Vice Mayor of Beijing Zhang Mao said today that fever outpatient departments in Beijing had become a prominent problem in the work of SARS prevention and treatment and the government attached great importance to it. According to him, some problems occurred in the past several weeks because fever outpatient departments in some hospitals were not qualified. Recently, Premier Wen Jiabao gave an instruction to the Beijing Municipal Government, who said, “Fever outpatient departments should be: proper in quantity, reasonable in distribution and qualified in equipment.” Later on, a rectification project on these departments was launched and it has now achieved some positive results.
Zhang Mao, also deputy head of the Beijing SARS Control Working Group, made these remarks at the sixth news conference given by the Beijing SARS Control Working Group, which was held in Beijing today.
According to Vice Mayor Zhang, the rectification of the fever outpatient departments covered the following three aspects:
First, promulgate a series of regulations to standardize outpatient departments in terms of conditions, procedures, medical workers and protection measures.
Second, strictly follow standards given by the regulations to avoid the cross infection between departments, fever patients, conventional fever patients, SARS patients and patients who are on observation of SARS, and the cross infection between medical workers and SARS patients. So-called “three standards” are regulated and implemented, which mean outpatient department condition standard, medical worker standard and the working procedure standard. Implementation of the “three standards” are all under close inspection of medical specialties.
Third, adopt two important measures: epidemic investigations of suspected and diagnosed patients are brought forward to fever outpatient departments to determine infection sources and cut off infection channels; medical helplines have been opened in many areas to help callers decide whether they should visit an outpatient department. What’s more, ambulances routinely cruise in communities to offer medical services for residents on the spot. In this way, many patients can receive primary diagnosis before they actually visit outpatient departments.
“We will provide qualified fever outpatient departments to Beijing residents,” said Zhang Mao, “The hospital beds for fever patients have increased after our initial stage of work. So far the designated hospitals still have vacant wards. There is no problem in receiving patients.”
Also present at the conference were Han Demin, managing director of the Beijing Health Bureau and an ENT (ear-nose-throat) expert, and Liang Wannian, vice director of the Beijing Health Bureau and expert in health management and epidemiology.
(China.org.cn May 13, 2003)
